


say hello, say hi

by ninemoons42



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Based on a Tumblr Post, Child Luke Skywalker, Friendship, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Pre-Canon, well less child and more of baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 03:32:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11073186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Beru Whitesun thinks Luke Skywalker, only newly come to her home in the dunes of Tatooine, might well be destined for great things: but for now, she thinks he's a source of light.





	say hello, say hi

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [THIS](https://softwedge.tumblr.com/post/161193103531/toddler-luke-saying-hi-to-everyone-but-as-soon) tumblr exchange.

She stands at the door of the homestead for another long moment: and only the two suns soaring high into the clear and relentless sky see the worry that shivers in her hands, that haunts her footsteps with a breeze that is sharp with heat: and that’s the simoom coming, she thinks, that’s the sandstorm that means they’ll have to seal up all the windows tonight. She’s desert born and desert bred, and she’s desert stock, and the child she can hear, giggling softly to himself in his little cobbled-together box padded with several layers of old and soft open-weave cloth, is still a newcomer. He might cry, tonight, and she’ll need to think of another song to sing to him. 

A child of the skies and of the stars, she thinks, skies as blue as his own startling eyes. 

She shakes her head against the inevitable thoughts of this child’s lost mother, this child’s lost father. She’s not ignorant and Tatooine is not separated from the holonews feeds. She knows the names and titles of the woman who must have borne this child -– but she also knows the gentle eyes and the strong hands of that same woman. The steel in her voice and the firmness of her shoulders, unbowed by the enormous weights she seemed to carry around with her. 

There’s a thump behind her, quiet, and the little boy’s burbling stops: and only a few days have passed since he came to her and to Owen, but she’s already learned much about the sounds and the silences of this new little life. First and foremost: he makes such noises, such a variety of them, and almost all of them sweet and funny by turns. Sometimes he frets, of course, and sometimes he wails, and then it’s a struggle to get him to calm down.

So she turns when he goes quiet, and hurries to get on her knees next to him, and she gets a warm toothless smile and those crinkles of baby-soft plumpness in his wrists and in his legs. 

He’s a mess of his breakfast and the sand that settles in his hair, and she wags her finger playfully at him: what a treat it is to see him focus on her, bright sharp attention, and attempt to reach out for her hair.

(He’s a gentle child, she thinks, because he pulls but never yanks, and he kicks with such chubby feet. Maybe she’ll find his childish malice in the near future, and maybe she won’t -– babies are selfish after all, as are children -– but right now he’s about as harmful as a cloud sailing across the sky.)

“Come on, you,” she says after a quick glance at the chrono. “Time for another bath and then we’ve got to go to the market.”

Is she imagining that he tilts his head at her, that he’s paying attention to her?

Maybe not, she thinks, a little later. Luke’s bright eyes move from object to object and being to being, at the tiny Anchorhead market: he doesn’t cry, he doesn’t fuss, he’s just interested.

He’s too young to speak in anything more than laughter and bright sounds, the opening and closing of his star-shaped little hands, and he seems to want to reach out to everyone who crosses his path: and even the surly keeper of one of the food stalls shakes her head and lets out an almost amiable grunt in his general direction. 

“Say hello,” she croons encouragingly to Luke, and he obliges her, chuckling at the pair of male humans who run one of the shops with scrounged-up bits and pieces of shiny metal.

She picks up a patch kit for one of the moisture towers, and that’s the last of her purchases for the day: she turns for home.

On the way, she crosses paths with the man who’s lately come to the planet, or that’s what the local gossip says at least. Still red in the face as though he were too new to the baking heat of the days, the deadly cold of the nights. He walks with too much fear for someone rumored to be a soldier or a warrior of some kind. There is something familiar about him, something that tugs at her memory -– and maybe that’s why she swerves toward him at the last minute.

He tries to weave away from her.

She’s about to give it up for a bad whim, and just make her way home, when: Luke goes silent, opens his mouth, lets out a piercing cry.

There is no doubt in Beru’s mind that the man in his cloak stops and stares and steps forward, before checking himself, and seeming to turn away.

She bounces a still-crying Luke in her arms, and hurries to the man: and when she reaches him, Luke goes quiet, smiles, holds out a hand from his swaddling wraps.

And Beru recognizes the man. “You.” She gently pushes him into a shadowed corner. “You said you would leave.”

“I did. And then I had to come back.” The voice is the confirmation: this is still Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“Because of him,” Beru says. Bounces Luke again. He smiles at her.

And Obi-Wan is smiling, too, if only reluctantly. “Yes. I -– I made a promise.”

“Not to us,” she says, but not to chastise.

Obi-Wan flinches anyway. 

She shakes her head. 

Passes Luke over.

Obi-Wan holds on to Luke, gentle, too-careful.

And Luke laughs, tugs on a handful of Obi-Wan’s robes.

“Come on,” Beru says.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about all things Star Wars on Tumblr -- [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
